Thursday, December 11, 2008

#127 Samuel Ligon Cannot Be Beaten

When Samuel Ligon was growing up, his family moved every 3-4 years (his father was transferred or offered a better job somewhere else). This never seemed strange, but Sam is unusually close to his three siblings as a result. After his childhood, Sam moved away to Urbana-Champaign to attend the University of Illinois, which turned out to be a great place to be because that’s where Kim was too. Back then, at first, they were both in these toxic relationships and friends with each other's toxic boyfriend/girlfriend, but they got together before their senior year. Everybody loves Kim (for example, she's never applied for a job and not gotten it). Sam knew that he wanted to marry Kim the minute they got together and she felt the same way, so they did that when they were 22. A week later, they left the country to teach English in Japan. Sam wanted to be a writer and he thought writers should leave the country. In Japan, they found a dead body, a guy who had hung himself up in the mountains east of Kyoto. The dead man was blue and they called him Blueboy and he was exactly what Sam had been looking for. They left Japan and Sam wrote a story called “Blueboy”—about some expatriates in Japan who find a dead body. It was published in The Quarterly—Sam’s first published story (1988). During three weeks in 2001, 9/11 happened 50 miles upwind from Sam and Kim, his first book was accepted for publication (Safe in Heaven Dead, 2003), and his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer treatment sucked, and it was hard with a Paul and Jane (at the time, just 3 and 5, respectively), but their friends came from all over the country to help. Sam lived on Long Island for over 10 years—by far the longest he has ever lived anywhere. (Sam has lived in most states north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi.) Then he moved the family to Spokane 4 years ago, for his teaching job at Eastern Washington University. In the West, people think Sam is a New Yorker, and, most oddly to Sam, Jewish, which he’s happy to let them think. Now that the family has settled in Spokane, he doesn't want to move them again. Sam wants to raise Jane and Paul in one place, even though he claims to like the fact that he’s from everywhere. Jane is an incredible artist and Paul is the funniest person Sam knows. What else? Both of the kids are really nice people, probably because they have such nice parents. What else? Sam’s first story collection, Drift and Swerve, will come out in 2009. More? Sam doesn't play golf or have a boat, but he does edit Willow Springs. The last bit that recurs through the whole life? Kim is fine now, and Sam and Kim have been married 23 years. They're happy. They think their kids are happy. None of them has ever been beaten.

[Note: This postcard life story is part of a series of postcard life stories that will appear in Keyhole #6 (guest edited by William Walsh), where all the contributor bios will be postcard life stories--the idea being to make every possible aspect of the magazine literature.]

Nice Things About Us

Time Out London: “A deep love between an ageing husband and wife is given a heartbreaking voice ... tender and poignant”

El País: “Haunting and awesome ... beautiful and intense ... This is a novel from a great talent.”

Nice Things About Us

Observer: “Powerful and moving ... breathless”

El Placer de la Lectura: “A monument to love”

The Glasgow Herald: “Be warned: this book has the power to make even the most hard-hearted of readers shed a tear. ... Kimball has broken into new territory: Us is one of the most graphic depictions of illness and loss I have ever read.”

Letras Libres: Michael Kimball "already delivers the future of the novel ... [He is] one of the authentic innovators in contemporary fiction."

Blake Butler: “There are two books I can remember that ever made me physically cry. There were the rape scenes in Saramago’s Blindness, and there was nearly every chapter of Michael Kimball’s [Us]. While the first hurt because it was so brutal, Kimball’s was a softer kind of invocation—as I read it in a bathtub, I could not shake the feeling of being held, as if somehow the words had interlaced my skin. This is the essence of the magic Michael Kimball holds—his sentences come on so taut, so right there, and yet somehow so calming, it’s as if you are being visited by some lighted presence.”

El Razón: “Bathed in tenderness ... touching and breathtaking ... one of the most moving, heartbreaking, and sad novels of contemporary American fiction. It is essential.”

Telegraph and Argus: “This is the saddest book I have ever read and one of the most beautiful ... One can’t help being aware of his grief and the great love he feels for his dying wife. It will make you cry and break your heart but this is one book you must read.”

60 Writers/60 Places

I Will Smash You

Nice Things on Dear Everybody

The Believer: "a curatorial masterpiece"

The LA Times: "funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking"

Time Out New York: "stunning"

The Star-Democrat: "elegantly and eloquently written ... an unforgettable book"

Gary Lutz: “Dear Everybody confirms Kimball's reputation as one of our most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human predicament.”

Largehearted Boy: "Dear Everybody is a cleverly constructed book that balances pathos and humor exquisitely, and proves Michael Kimball to be a master storyteller."

The Citizen: "superb"

WYPR: “quite a literary feat"

The Faster Times: "Michael Kimball is a badass."

HTMLGIANT: "Dear Everybody is one of the finest, most heartbreaking books I’ve ever read."

David McLendon: "I know of no one ... who knows and understands every cog and flywheel and screw of the language machine to the degree of Kimball's reach."

Word Riot: Dear Everybody is "forever embedded in my brain."

Maud Casey: “Dear Everybody has the page-turning urgency of a mystery and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great epistolary novels.”

HTMLGIANT: "one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year"

Words

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Nice Things About BIG RAY

Sam Lipsyte: “Michael Kimball has been writing innovative, compelling, and beautifully felt books for years, but BIG RAY seems a break-through and culmination all at once. It's funny and terrifying and it's his masterpiece, at least so far.”

Dana Spiotta: “Big Ray, the man, made an indelible human impression on me. BIG RAY, Michael Kimball's terrific new novel, is genuinely moving because it is so rigorously unsentimental. Kimball is a powerful and courageous writer.”

Jon McGregor: "BIG RAY, a slim and finely-toned book about an overweight ruin of a father, is an uncompromising work of power and grace. I finished reading it a week ago, but I still can't put it down."

Deb Olin Unferth: "Elegy, meditation, story, final reckoning—whatever you want to call it, BIG RAY is mesmerizing. Sorrowful and honest, the kind of book that compels, not compromises, BIG RAY is an incredible accomplishment."

Madison Smartt Bell: “BIG RAY is disturbing in the most extraordinary ways, and in the end extraordinarily touching also. There’s nothing quite like it I’ve ever read till now (though there were times I thought the ghost of Barry Hannah was whispering in my ear.) It’s amazing what a deep resonance a writer of Michael Kimball’s quality can strike with a very few words.”

Jessica Anya Blau: BIG RAY is stunning, haunting, and beautiful. This groundbreaking and unforgettable novel should not be missed.

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About Me

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls "a curatorial masterpiece") and, most recently, Us (which Time Out Chicago calls "a simply gorgeous and astonishing book"). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and two documentary films, I Will Smash You and 60 Writers/60 Places. His new novel, Big Ray, will be published by Bloomsbury in Fall 2012.